*2 Suicide missions are no doubt as old as human conflict, and you and I may have actually glimpsed the grey and grainy footage of the kamikaze (the word translates as divine wind) going about his work over the Pacific, in 1944–5. But Japan, at that stage, was fighting for national survival, and the tactic was partly an effect of what Churchill called ‘the moral rot of war’: as a war grows older, it also grows crueller. September 11 was not the last act of a drama but its prologue; the suicide mission is what it started with…Some points of general comparison. The kamikazes’ ‘success rate’ (hitting a ship) was 19 per cent; they killed 4,900 sailors at the cost of 3,860 pilots. Al-Qaeda’s success rate (hitting a building) was 75 per cent; they killed just under 3,000 for the loss of nineteen. The kamikaze operation lasted for ten months, al-Qaeda’s for just ninety-one minutes. And while the suicidaires of 1944–5 killed uniformed enemy combatants, those of 2001 killed men, women, and children who were dressed for the office or for the airport.
*3 The angle was in fact twelve degrees – confirming the marked distortion of one’s senses on that day (with the pathetic fallacy also showing its presence). But the mind was not deceived about the aircraft’s speed. In the thicker air of the troposphere, planes observe set limits, and must not exceed 230 mph below 2,500 feet (stacked above an airport, you are wallowing around at 150 mph). Muhammad Atta hit the North Tower at 494 mph (floors ninety-three to ninety-nine); Marwan al-Shehhi hit the South Tower at 586 mph (floors seventy-five to eighty-five) and his 767 was close to breaking up in the air. Partly for this reason, the North Tower stood for just over a hundred minutes, the South Tower for just under an hour.
*4 Much later I would learn that British Islamists, lifelong residents of (say) Bradford or Luton, habitually disobeyed traffic lights, on principle, as a way of showing their disdain for the norms of an alien and impious land. The deeper urge, perhaps, is to free yourself from reason. This is really a sine qua non for the jihadi ideologue: free yourself from reason, and anything seems possible (at least for a while), including world domination and a global caliphate…I cannot refrain from quoting Lolita – three pages from the end. Humbert is in his car, having just murdered his rival Clare Quilty: ‘…since I had disregarded all the laws of morality, I might as well disregard the laws of traffic…It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itch.’
*5 The phrase ‘all off’ derives, I assume, from the sphere of spontaneous brawls and broils and ruckuses. It means something like ‘now anything goes’ or ‘now all hell can break loose’ or ‘now all bets are off’. In Bill Buford’s book about football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, a tracksuited capo rallies his troops by weaving among them and potently repeating the words It’s going to go off. In this context violence ‘goes off’ in the way a bomb goes off. Mike and Steve were applying ‘it’s all off’ to international relations – and informally prefiguring the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Chapter 4 September 11
3: The days after the day after
Don Juan in Hull
Elena yawned lavishly and said to him, ‘It’s midnight.’
‘That’s true, El. It is now September 13.’
‘And I’m tired…Why does she call Larkin the poet from Hell?’
‘…It’s not in the sense of, I don’t know – the neighbour from hell. He was the poet from Hell, capital aitch. Hell was where he lived. Hull. A port city in Yorkshire, Pulc, where the constant mist reeks of fish.’ With his sound hand Martin got hold of the Scotch bottle and poured himself a big one. ‘He wasn’t from Hull yet, mind, not in 1948. He was still pulling his wire down in Leicester.’
‘How old was he then? Was he just a librarian?’
‘Mm, and he wasn’t a poet yet either, not mainly. He was Kingsley’s age, so twenty-six. But he was a red squirrel all right. He’d already published two novels.’
She said, ‘Like you.’
‘…Uh, yeah, now you mention it.’ He drank. ‘You know, at that stage it looked as though Larkin would be the novelist and Kingsley’d be the poet. If anything.’
‘Your wound’s seeping. Use the roll.’ She took up the pages. ‘PL as she now calls him got to Ainsham in time for Christmas Day. And he was still there when Kingsley crept back with his dirty laundry on New Year’s Eve. So there was an awkward but in the end “very jolly” Hogmanay. In quotes. I see. They all got pissed.’
‘Yeah, assuming they had the cash. They were very poor. I was a penniless baby.’
‘Kingsley said he knew at once that something had happened. He was frankly relieved because it sort of equalised the guilt. PL took his leave on Jan 2 and K and Hilly, after a cagey interlude, got back to normal. At which point they discovered Hilly was pregnant. With you, Martin. And Kingsley hadn’t laid a finger on her since November.
‘They agreed that they’d never say anything to PL. Who would’ve been horrified, don’t you think? Being a child-hater?…And life went on.
‘Anyway, such was Kingsley’s account. And of course he swore me to absolute secrecy. Well, that vow I considered void the moment I saw his obituary. For six years I’ve been wondering when it would be best to tell you and so free myself of this awful burden. Oh, sure…I feel better already. Yeah, I bet you
